Class Reunion: The Remaking of the American White Working Class

Title: Class Reunion: The Remaking of the American White Working ClassAuthor(s): Lois WeisPublisher: Routledge/Falmer, New YorkISBN: 0415949084, Pages: 216, Year: 2004Search for book at Amazon.com

Lois Weiss Class Reunion provides an in-depth portrait of how economic restructuring at the end of the twentieth century fundamentally altered the way white working-class men and women, coming of age in the rapidly de-industrializing city of Freeway, construct class identities. Weis captures how de-industrialization not only strips jobs from working-class communities but also disrupts the hegemonic gender roles and hierarchies that held them together. Through longitudinal ethnographic and interview data collected at two significant points in time, in 1985 shortly after the closing of Freeways largest manufacturing plant and again in 2000 after the city lost virtually all of its industrial centers, Weis illustrates how the success of the new working-class is dependent on remaking the class and gender identities held by the old industrial working-class. Within the new global order, working-class families, unable to thrive on one income alone, must reconstruct old hegemonic notions of gender to produce... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

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Janel BensonUniversity of PennsylvaniaE-mail AuthorJANEL BENSON is a Ph.D Candidate in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include education, family, race and the life course.